Rawn Shah is Director & Social Business Architect at Rising Edge. He has been an active explorer and advisor of collaboration and culture in online communities and across organizations as a journalist, a gamer, a content marketer, a business process strategist since before the advent of the Web. In prior roles, he has led collaboration strategy and transformation efforts in the IBM global enterprise focused on employee enablement, marketing & sales business processes, technology, policy, and ethics. He is a prolific writer with over 500 articles published in print or online in Forbes, CNN, JavaWorld, LinuxWorld, Advanced Systems, among dozens of others technical and business publications, and is the author of seven books, including "Social Networking for Business" (Wharton School Publishing/Pearson, 2010). He currently writes business-technical blogs on Forbes, LinkedIn, and rawnshah.com. He can be reached on various social channels linked from http://about.me/rawn

Redrawing a Social Business Timeline Infographic

Fellow Forbes blogger Haydn Shaughnessy recently posted an infographic in describing Social business and the Growth of Shared Value. He created this together with Global Dawn, a consultancy based in London. The goal according to their blog was to trace the history of Social Business years back to show that it is not a new fad. It was very well done, but as I pointed out on Twitter, it is missing quite a lot of detail in terms of what social business actually covers. This to me unfortunately limits the view and perpetuates some of the confusion on what social business means.

The infographic relates three streams of Technology, Marketing and Social. This is where I take point. For one, it complicates the overlap of two common definitions of ‘social business’ or ‘social enterprise’. The first definition focuses working on an entrepreneurial level with the aim of delivering social good, civic responsibility, and general welfare development of a local region, group or even the world in general.

While entities like the Peace Corp and other Non-Governmental Organizations have long supported the idea of social good, the real goal is to develop commercial interest and business. A better example would be the Fair-Trade programs of which Starbucks is an avid supporter: buying from small or regional agricultural – in this case, coffee bean farmers – and paying them a fair market price, so the local economy can grow rather than sourcing just from large growers. Similarly, the Supplier Connection story I posted last month is conceptually the same.

The other definition of ‘social business’ is what is really being discussed here: how to use the power of network relationships, and online social interactivity to empower the processes of any business. Companies like IBM, Lithium Technologies, Salesforce.com, SAP, and others all have their own name for this concept but in essence it is the same base idea. This term however is not necessarily linked to social good; it can be, but doesn’t need to. To stretch the imagination consider that modern high-tech criminal organizations may rely just as much on social networks, with little social good in mind.

To focus on this second definition, social business can apply to any area of a business: marketing, sales, customer service, product development, innovation, human resources, business partnerships, etc. When you look at it particularly closely on where social relationships are most relevant, the key areas are in terms of optimizing the workforce, managing the relationship with customers throughout the lifecycle of their involvement, and innovating through new products and services.

Marketing is but one line of business here. It gets a lot of attention because external social media itself draws so much attention from marketing departments. However, online collaboration and communities existed for other domains such as support and service decades before marketing concepts entered here.

Technology, of the online community and social networking kind, applies horizontally and extensively throughout. Social is likewise horizontal but rather than technology or tools, it refers to models of how people can work together. This is a sociological, cultural, work modeling, and organizational design thought. Also here are the models of open innovation, crowdsourcing and collective intelligence.

For people to get it, what they’ve have to see is examples of how organization’s are doing social in different lines of business. For example, how Kurimoto Ltd in Japan, a manufacturer of heavy industrial piping and ductwork is using social business to help their engineers in each division break out of working only within their silos, thereby accelerating innovation and cross-pollination of ideas. In that line of thinking, the infographic does show Lego and their model of customer co-creation which is also the domain of product innovation. No marketing involvement here.

Another example might be how companies like VMware is attracting potential new employees by allowing candidates to immerse themselves among the existing employees in an online social network to get a feel for the culture and direction of the organization before they even join. That isn’t really marketing, but rather a function of HR recruiting.

I recently co-spoke with a friend on the significance of looking at social business in terms of the concerns of the executives and leaders of the various lines of business, and they can be quite different. For example, a marketing executive may prioritize the need to improve preference and loyalty to the company’s brand of products or services, while a General Manager may be concerned that the employees are sharing their knowledge and being helpful to each other across silos. The technology involved may be the same, but unless it is properly designed to each particular business concern, it appears too vague.

The point in particular is that if we want to make social business relevant on a wider level to any organization, we have to think of how it fits into the concerns and strategic direction of each line of business. This creates specific design requirements to the business needs. Something designed for one area may simply not take into account the relevant business issues that crucial to another; the design for one may also be just too awkward or inefficiently designed for the other.

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Thanks for taking this up Rawn. The key to my infographic is that we must seek out new ways to create shared value – the output of value is also important and the area where companies also need to think through the social element.

the money quote: The other definition of ‘social business’ is what is really being discussed here: how to use the power of network relationships, and online social interactivity to empower the processes of any business. Companies like IBM, Lithium Technologies, Salesforce.com, SAP, and others all have their own name for this concept but in essence it is the same base concept. This term however is not necessarily linked to social good; it can be, but doesn’t need to. To stretch the imagination consider that modern high-tech criminal organizations may rely just as much on social networks, with little social good in mind.

Just in case I am misunderstood, I did not mean that these companies I mentioned are not interested in social good whatsoever. Rather, it is simply a different domain of thought, sometimes overlapping and sometimes not.